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Politics

If ever the country needed bed rest and a chance to dose up on Prozac or the antidepressant of your choice, it’s now. Through some 20 televised debates and hundreds of interviews, Republican aspirants to the presidency assaulted the nation’s intelligence, or what was left of it, with displays of venality, egomania, pandering, deception, self-delusion, self-promotion and scripted nonsense -- and that’s just from Newt Gingrich.

America’s capacity for low comedy or high cons may be deep but a point must come when it’s too much. It could have happened around the 19th debate when Gingrich -- pardon, Professor Gingrich -- was running low on ideas to impress voters. After he proposed turning schoolchildren into janitors, he went over the moon by promising -- by the end of his second term as president, no less -- that he would have built a colony on, where else, the moon. That led Ron Paul, in a flash of welcomed wit amid the dross, to suggest we “send some politicians up there.”

WASHINGTON -- Declaring themselves "strongly unified and intensely focused," the nation's top Catholic bishops vowed to continue their multipronged defense of religious liberty in the courts, Congress and the White House.

Does Rick Santorum's Southern surge also herald the return of the Religious Right?

Last January, the titans of Christian conservatism were widely dismissed as irrelevant, at best, after 150 of them gathered for an evangelical "conclave" at a Texas ranch and anointed Rick Santorum as their champion -- only to see him finish third in rock-ribbed South Carolina a week later, well behind Newt Gingrich and even their least-loved candidate, Mitt Romney.

Now, however, with Santorum on a roll after big primary wins on Tuesday in Alabama and Mississippi, those born-again bigwigs and their allies may be having the last laugh.

"People have been writing the obituary of the pro-family, evangelical movement for 25 years -- and they're always wrong," said Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and the architect of the Christian Coalition in the 1980s.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of the Susan B. Anthony List, which spent $500,000 boosting Santorum's candidacy ahead of Tuesday's primaries, said the formula is quite simple: "Social issues are winning issues."

A year ago as a national debate raged over federal deficits and budgets, 50 lay and ordained leaders from a wide representation of Christian traditions threw up a “Circle of Protection” around government programs that they said “meet the essential needs of hungry and poor people at home and abroad.”

A U.S. defense department document released in January and reports last month of the anticipated release of a presidential study on nuclear arms have raised expectations about a potentially significant reduction in the number of the country’s deployed nuclear weapons.

Faculty members of Jesuit-run John Carroll University in Cleveland have urged U.S. Catholic church acceptance of the Obama administration’s contraceptive insurance regulation as adapted Feb. 10.

The federal Health and Human Services regulation mandates that nearly all employee health insurance plans cover artificial contraception and voluntary sterilization services, including plans for employees of many religiously run institutions, even if the sponsors of those institutions are morally opposed to the use of those prescriptions or medical procedures.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The new federal mandate that employers provide free insurance coverage for contraceptives that can be abortifacients, sterilizations and other services has united Christians across denominational lines, said a lawyer for the American Center for Law and Justice during a panel discussion at Aquinas College in Nashville.

"They understand it's not about contraceptives but religious liberty and abortion," said David French, senior counsel for the center who lives in Columbia, south of Nashville.

PORTLAND, Maine -- Faced with a second referendum on same-sex marriage in three years, the Diocese of Portland will focus its efforts this time on education rather than contributing money or its name to a political campaign.

"We learned the last time around that we need to do a lot more effective teaching" about the nature of marriage as a union of a man and a woman, said Bishop Richard J. Malone of Portland at a March 2 news conference.

In November 2009, by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent, Maine voters repealed a law allowing same-sex marriage in the state. Supporters of same-sex marriage have gathered enough signatures to place the issue before the voters again Nov. 6.

At the news conference, Malone made public a 22-page pastoral letter titled "Marriage: Yesterday, Today, Always," which he said will be "at the heart of our response" to current challenges facing the institution of marriage.

He said in 2009, the diocese had supported the repeal campaign through television ads and by holding a special collection at Masses. In addition, Malone said he sent an appeal for contributions to nearly every U.S. bishop.

The Obama administration is rejecting charges by the nation's top Catholic bishop that talks to modify a controversial birth control mandate are "going nowhere" because of alleged White House intransigence and efforts to diminish the central role of the bishops.

"The White House has put nearly every issue requested by the bishops on the table for discussion and has sought the views of bishops on resolving difficult policy problems, only to be rebuffed," an administration official close to the negotiations said Tuesday.

Strapped for cash and paid staff, Rick Santorum has enlisted a ragtag but politically potent army to keep his campaign afloat: home-schoolers.

Heading into Super Tuesday, Santorum urged home-schoolers to organize rallies, to post favorable features on social media and to ring doorbells on his behalf.

"Santorum has been very aggressive in reaching out to the home-schooling community, especially in the last month," said Rebecca Keliher, the CEO and publisher of Home Educating Family Publishing.

Drawing on his experience as a home-schooling father of seven, the former Pennsylvania senator has also sought to rally enthusiasm by pledging to continue that course in the White House.

"It's a great sacrifice that my wife, Karen, and I have made to try to give what we think is the best possible opportunity for our children to be successful," Santorum said during a March 1 campaign stop in Georgia. "Not just economically, but in a whole lot of other areas that we think are important -- virtue and character and spirituality."